


Patterns

by The_Birds_And_Bees



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied Violence, Introspection, Post-Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 11:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5373347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Birds_And_Bees/pseuds/The_Birds_And_Bees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.</p><p>There is no free will.<br/>There are no variables.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patterns

**Author's Note:**

> For they know who.

* * *

 

**There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.**

 

**There is no free will.**

**There are no variables.**

 

* * *

It’s so quiet.

The wind is sometimes a vague companion. Rarely strong enough to travel down this far, it gently teases the flowers into bobbing gently back and forth on their stems; aside from one with conscious thought, who consciously decides not to bother.

It’s one of the very few decisions he has left to make, these days. Be still. Be silent. _Don’t cry_.

A smile crosses his face at some point, twisted and ugly. A conscious decision to break rule one. No additional, destructive urges to tear apart rule two.

Rule three is more of a guideline. Something to vaguely keep in mind as he adjusts to the phantom sensations of limbs, of height, of fur. Of feeling.

Not much has changed since the first time, then, aside from the insufferable lack of life in the Ruins- the entirety of the Underground by extension. The saying ‘only soul left’ would apply. Had anyone else been there.

There’s no one. The Underground is soulless. And it’s been that way for some time now; all of it’s prior inhabitants vacated from their overcrowded cage. No motions, aside from the flowers swaying in the breeze. No sound, aside from the echoing drips of water falling from the cavern ceiling.

That’s all there is. That’s all there has been, and that’s all the future will hold. An endless, dull pattern of vague sense and whimsy decisions with no impact. Rinse. Repeat.

That’s all the future should hold.

Not the tramping of booted feet down abandoned corridors. It’s so foreign by this point that Flowey finds himself looking upwards almost too sharply at the doorway, watching. An odd, unheard of sensation makes it’s way down his back, stem arching upwards as he leans towards it, gaze zeroed in at a very specific height-

 

 

 

It’s not anticipation.

It’s not disappointment, either, when the human that comes into view is much too tall for Flowey’s explicit tastes, dressed head to toe in kharki.

“Alpha charlie, Point has entered final chambers of designation Home, over.” The human intones. and bored eyes sweep right over and past him as he bristles. “Please advise; research team Delta should be prepared to conduct-”

“ _Get out…._ ”

He hisses the words, and the room falls silent. Still, the human doesn’t _move;_ they look, trying to ascertain his location and testing non-existent patience.

“ _g **E** t **O** u **T.**_ ” His voice warps- distorts, echoes. Twists the fabric of space in a deceiving little trick that collects into the sound of a howling cat and a screaming banshee, bullets flying from the flower patch and embedding themselves into the door.

This time, the human wisely chooses to do as it’s told. Horrified yells echo back to him long after the footsteps die away.

Imagining a certain amount of satisfaction with the result is discarded to the wind without a second thought- there’s no use for it. Empty. Fake.

He watches, instead. Ponders the seemingly significant event, reaches down into the gnarled roots of his magic, still stretched out thin beneath the expanse of the Underground, and takes a dive.

The human isn’t alone. Flowey confirms this himself, eyeing off the campsite before the front of the Ruins with deathly silence; dangerous. Intentional.

They never see him coming. Not until the earth beneath their feet seemingly rips itself apart.

 

* * *

 

Time lost meaning eons ago. Either there’s light filtering down into the Ruins by a far away sun, or there’s not. Flowey doesn’t know or even _desire to know_ the spans of time wasted between when he notices and when he doesn’t; there’s an ironic pointlessness to time when it’s exactly the same, each hour an exact parallel to the last, to the next. A pattern of routine that overbearingly simple to follow.

The arrival of humans into his midst, realistically, is not surprising either. It’s eons in coming; the species too _curious_ to just let it be, too **determined** to stop. Predictable, right down to the way they immediately begin to fight back; in self defense, in defense of the simple minded justification that they _have to know,_ simply because they **_can._**

 

They have bullets now, too. And Flowey laughs, because it’s not funny.

 

It’s not even remotely funny.

 

Waging war is

  
  


 

Another pattern to repeat. Stalk, learn, disable. Destroy. The humans are positively clueless, aren’t they? Nobody warned them about their _Best. Friend._

They don’t know about this, then.

Someone else gave their consent.

More than anything else, that train of thought _could_ have irritated him.  He flits about their encampment, their “well fortified” posts like a ghost, but even more efficient. They expect a ghost. They don’t expect him.

Time, at least, begins to have more variance. It jumps erratically between small periods of calm and frenzied series of attack and defend- more humans arrive. There’s talk of things like the current hour, of shifts and rosters. Things to define it all. Things the Underground never should have heard again.

Things that have his mind working again. Planning out the near future, instead of resting stagnant in empty, meaningless space. It’s still meaningless. But it’s something.

More humans, again. They occupy the entirety of Snowdin and then some, and almost hourly, there’s meetings. Strategies. They send groups of padde humans into the forests and every time, he sends them back a little message of **_LOVE_** , with broken guns. Broken skin. Broken bones….

No broken souls. They can keep those, the sad sacks of worthless flesh and bone. He’s had enough of human souls to last him an eternity-

Quite the feat when he _literally_ has an eternity left to go.

  
  
  
  


Why is he still doing this?

  
  
  
  


 

 

What’s the point when the only thing left is six feet under the ground and several decades past a time where they could _care_ if their body was desecrated?

  
  
  


 

 

 

 

_What’s the **POINT?**_

  
  


He doesn’t know.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Or maybe he doesn’t want to know.

 

* * *

 

Weeks pass.

Rather, weeks pass from the point where he decides to pay attention to them again. The overall pattern to each day is simple, and every time he dives deeper, it’s even more. Simple.

That human is having an affair with that human.

That human twitches in their sleep. Wakes up with empty eyes that see horrors far, far away from here.

That one is _so dutiful, they’ll even take orders in their s l e e p….._

He doesn’t enjoy any of this. Flowey considers stopping- no. No, he doesn’t. The soulless creature never lets the thought cross his mind, too busy attempting to- protect? Ward away? If that’s his intent, the humans aren’t getting the picture. There should be an escalation, somewhere. A growing eye for an eye and a face for a _face until there’s only **bloody strips being buried under the snow….**_

A lack of escalation is still a pattern, albeit a more consistent one. They’re starting to get smarter; he’ll _always_ be smarter.

They’re being very quiet today. He’s been about the entire town turned encampment turned battlefield, but they’re not...talking. Not about anything interesting. It’s vaguely possible that they’ve finally decided to get _cluey_ about all of this.

He leaves Snowdin behind eventually. Has somewhere to be.

Wants to be high enough to see it when his prediction of the pattern comes true; when vehicles drive into the square, when the world erupts into a frenzy of activity around them. He gets it, of course. If their bullets aren’t big enough, if their bullets didn’t work, inevitably, they’d build a bigger set.

What Flowey expects is death. He expects the high screeching of a world flush with flame and destruction. He expects to see himself shrivelling up in the fire as he ensured they all **burned along with him.** He expects that.

He doesn’t expect them.

  
  
  
  
  


They got cluey.

  
  
  


He doesn’t expect _them_.

They send them out into the snow on their own. They’re still so tiny. They trip up on rocks hidden beneath the white powder and catch themselves on hands still covered in bandages- fresh ones. Bright, cute ones, with little cartoon faces on them. They’re actually dressed for the weather. They look warm.

They look loved.

He doesn’t want to wait. He doesn’t want to wait at all, but he does. Somehow. Until they’re away enough from everyone else for it not to matter anymore, until he can reach into his roots and pop up from the ground before them fast enough to make himself blink, dizzy.

And he says nothing. He just stares upwards, looks at them as they look back.

They smile.

 

 

 

They’re smiling at him.

“You know...you made a lot of people pretty mad.” The eight year old (are they still eight? are they sti) says, and he lurches, almost as if their voice has physically struck him. Petals curling in about his face in a recoil as _they_ stop talking and _keep looking at him._

They weren’t this talkative, before.

“...Um. I have to pay them back for all the guns. And we have to say sorry to all the people who got hurt, too. And we should let them do their research, too, because mom promised they could-”

“Frisk.”

He hasn’t spoken since the last time he screamed. He hasn’t spoken since

 

 

 

Flowey stares up at them, almost blankly. Almost. Not quite. He’s not sure what else could be in his stare right now. Something else. Something not quite blank.

The patterns are falling apart.

They always do when Frisk is involved.

“...Flowey?” The name makes him lurch, as well. Like a physical touch. A backhand. A _knife in the gut._ They crouch down in front of him, positively fearless. They never looked at him the same way after-

It’s not a good thing that they’re not scared of him, anymore.

“Frisk…”

Fraying. They’re all fraying. He looks into the future and Flowey can’t _see it at all, where this is going._ Predictability, gone. The humans got cluey.

 

 

They brought in their finest weapon.

  
  
  
  
  


“...Don’t you have anything better to do?”

 


End file.
